(The following story by Chip Jones appeared on the Times-Dispatch website on June 21.)
RICHMOND, Va. — Karen Rae knows all about the snail’s pace of passenger trains rolling into Richmond’s Main Street Station.
When her daughter rode Amtrak from Washington recently, it took 45 minutes to make the final leg from Staples Mill Station in Henrico County into the downtown Main Street Station – a distance of only 8 miles.
At that pace – about 11 mph – Rae’s daughter might have been better off riding a bike. Even in the best of times, the final 8-mile stretch into downtown usually takes trains 27 minutes.
“Getting through Richmond,” said Rae, the state’s top rail official, “is one of the most challenging segments of the entire route between the Northeast and Florida.”
The main reason for the slowdown is a sprawling freight rail yard southeast of Staples Mill Station.
The century-old Acca Yard, once the pride and joy of Richmond’s business leadership, has become a major pain in the caboose for Amtrak, for rail planners and especially for its owner, CSX Corp.
Located off the Downtown Expressway and Laburnum Avenue, the 250-acre facility usually bustles with rail cars, locomotives and other equipment.
Acca, CSX’s major transfer point in Virginia, is used to classify cars and build trains to move along on the railroad’s 23,000-mile system from Florida to Canada.
An estimated 50 to 55 freight and passenger trains roll through Acca daily, plus 10 trains that are formed – or “built” – there each day.
Acca’s growth was hailed by one rail executive in 1924 as key to “the prosperity of the city.” In more modern times, though, Acca’s growth has become a double-edged sword. Its congestion is part of wider operating problems for CSX – problems caused by closing other yards or giving up miles of track.
In Virginia, the closing of the larger Potomac Yard in Alexandria in the early 1990s for real estate development began to exacerbate congestion here.
Now Acca is likened to the mother of all highway gridlock: the “Mixing Bowl,” where the Capital Beltway converges with interstates 395 and 95 in Springfield in Northern Virginia.
“Acca Yard could be compared to the Springfield interchange,” Rae said.
A healthy economy this year has actually made things worse for CSX along its own “I-95 corridor,” the New York-to-Florida tracks that provide vital rail service for much of the Eastern United States.
“There’s too much volume and it’s a bottleneck,” Rae said. “It’s like taking 14 lanes of traffic and funneling it into two lanes.”
John Gibson, CSX’s vice president of operations planning and research, described Acca as a “narrow area where there’s limited flexibility” to move trains.
The railroad currently suffers from some of the worst performance marks in the industry, according to the trade journal Traffic World.
CSX recently held a conference to reassure major customers that a new operating plan will help speed shipments and provide more reliable service. “The One Plan” is based on software that has helped other railroads, including Norfolk Southern Corp., make more precise decisions on train operations.
This ebb and flow of trains might be a mere curiosity for passing motorists or train buffs, but for one thing: Acca Yard could keep Richmond’s Main Street Station from becoming a major destination for passenger trains.
“It’s a major, major headache,” said Alan Tobias, the state’s manager of passenger-rail programs. “This is what keeps us from getting more trains into Main Street Station.”
The vintage station reopened in December after nearly three decades with no rail service.
City Council has expressed high hopes for the $51.6 million project, including turning it into a downtown transportation hub. But only four trains a day operating between Newport News and Washington stop there.
The passenger count has been slowly trending upward -1,045 people boarded or departed in May- but the ornate facility remains a blip on the Amtrak map.
By comparison, Staples Mill Station in Henrico County had nearly 20,000 passengers in May.
Amtrak officials say they would like to change that. “Staples Mill is a functional station, but it doesn’t do the downtown justice,” said Drew Galloway, a senior director in Amtrak’s strategic-planning department.
The passenger railroad has conducted market surveys that indicate the stations serve distinct markets, with Staples Mill providing access on the west side of Richmond and the suburbs. Main Street offers closer rail service for city residents and for people who live south or east of Richmond.
The key, Galloway said, is improving the 27-minute average slog between Staples Mill and Main Street. The goal is to cut it in about half.
Parts of Acca Yard can move Amtrak trains efficiently. It has a designated “bypass track” for passenger trains on CSX’s main north-south line.
This track on Acca’s west side continues south down the median of the Downtown Expressway. From there, trains cross the James River on a railroad bridge beside the Powhite Parkway.
It’s Amtrak’s eastern swing that creates the clash of rail titans.
“It works good on trains to Florida or North Carolina,” Galloway said, but not for trains going to Newport News.
A number of solutions are on the drawing board – from building two bypass tracks on Acca’s eastern edge to trying to move much of CSX operations out of the yard altogether.
The latter solution would involve building a new rail yard somewhere north of Richmond, an option that CSX’s Gibson called only “a theoretical concept at this point.”
But officials from the three major players – CSX, Amtrak and the state – agree that it is in everyone’s best interest to do something about Acca before it turns into one big railroad parking lot.
There are short-term improvements, including retooling or closing street crossings along the way to Main Street Station. The state has about $15 million earmarked for that work, and it only needs CSX’s green light to get started.
But larger issues must be addressed before the trains can roll faster into the Richmond station.
Standing on the south end of the Westwood Avenue bridge, Rae looked down at the maze of tracks below.
“You can’t bring a train through here until there’s space to wedge it in,” she said.
. . .
Acca’s chief choke point occurs in a 31?2-mile stretch where trains must traverse a series of switch points to proceed to Main Street. Crossing all those tracks is a bit like crossing lanes on a freeway – but at skateboard speeds of 15 to 20 mph.
One possible solution is to build another set of bypass tracks for passenger trains. That would divert trains leaving Staples Mill Station out of the crossover area.
A bypass would let trains travel at more reasonable speeds – 45 mph or so – and expedite the unsentimental journey through Acca.
But the time savings wouldn’t come cheap: The bypass track has a $56 million price tag. And it would require an additional $7 million investment to build a platform and make other modifications at Staples Mill.
CSX’s Gibson said the bypass might work, but he expressed reservations about losing some track capacity for freight trains.
In a less-than-ringing endorsement, Gibson said, “it’s not like it can’t work.”
But before CSX will commit to anything, it must see if its new operating plan is working.
According to Traffic World, CSX’s “One Plan” is meant to cut the number of times a rail car is handled from seven to five, as well as reduce trip times.
“Wall Street is watching the situation closely to see if CSX can pull it off, particularly after recently completing a management cut of 950 employees in April,” the magazine reported last week.
Broadly speaking, the longer trains can run without stopping, the fewer trains that fill switching yards such as Acca.
Gibson said CSX is exploring moving some work to Collier Yard near Petersburg. It also might build a smaller yard somewhere north of Richmond, he said, without being more specific.
Acca Yard has other pesky issues, including crew changes and special signals required for locomotives operating in the Richmond-Washington corridor.
But for Rae, the state’s top rail official, the fact that CSX is talking publicly about Acca is encouraging.
“I think they’re just taking a hard look at the entire network,” she said. “There seems to be an appetite to work with us.”
CSX, for its part, is taking a long view of Acca. Gibson said there are just too many moving parts right now to rush into anything his company might regret 100 years from now.
“Figuring out what to do with a place like Acca sounds like a simple thing – just put a computer to it and it will figure it out,” he said.
“It probably won’t,” Gibson said. “Experts don’t always agree when the options are pretty much infinite.”